Interviewing for Systems Design Skills
summary
Google SRE’s NALSD format tests concrete system design work: pick a simple problem, scale it to create real tradeoffs, and probe for numbers, failure modes and lifecycle plans. Example: designing a transfer like 100 GB to 100,000 machines exposes network, disk and coordination bottlenecks. Interviewers prepare a cheat sheet, constrain hardware or requirements to force distributed solutions, steer candidates toward decisions, and score against a preset hiring bar and rubrics for resource estimates, SLOs, and manageability.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:20Who should we hire
- 5:45Systems Engineering
- 6:50Interviewing Criteria
- 10:50Interview Question Example
- 15:40Scaling Up
- 23:28Requirements
- 25:03Followup questions
- 26:24Practice
- 31:03Uncertainty
- 35:06Expectations
- 37:12Steering
- 39:00Hints
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